At the tail end of Covid I went to one ALO show, one Mother Hips show and one San Geronimo show, and at those shows around Northern California, I danced, I re-found community, and I even cried (how could I not, at the piercing opening chords of the Hips' "Later Days").
This gorgeous poster art by San Geronimo band member Darren Nelson for his March 2022 show at Peri's in Fairfax, CA captures the zeitgeist of that time.
Darren's illustration is loaded with meaning. A female Native American figure is the center of the composition, with a skull and feathered head-dress, and flanked by giant wings, which happen to be tattooed on band member Jeremy D’Antonio (himself part Native American). The wings appear to be those of mythical Thunderbirds, as seen on totems in Ketchikan, Alaska or in indigenous pieces at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, and are rendered phoenix-like, rising from a wavy fire colored in jewel tones.
San Geronimo is a band from Marin County that has been making me groove since 2014. It’s also the name of the town where some of the band members have lived, in a valley close to the Pacific Ocean. Here, you can feel the water in the air much of the year, but when the forest fire smoke arrives... you just can’t breathe.
Tragic fires in Northern California ('17, '18, '20) were paid homage by another local band, the prolific Mother Hips, in “Mountain of Love" (2021), a song largely defined by a dramatic mountain-shaped bassline by Brian Rashap (who has also played bass with San Geronimo) and with memorable lyrics:
“the fire station’s on fire and there’s too many birds on the wire, you thought you could hear the waves but that’s just the fiiire."
If you’ve ever fled a fire, you’ve seen the birds flying away from the mountains, congregating and hollering to each other on the wires. Just like the song.
Darren's art also has a theme in common with ALO's “Grow your Hands Back,” which posted online in 2022 prior to the album release. Where are the hands of the Native American lady in Darren's art? This harkens to the "Handless Maiden" tale in Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. It was clearly time for me to dig into that book again after 30 years. The biggest takeaway for the feminists amongst us: personal evolution is not short-term; it takes a lifetime to evolve, overcome & develop.
In the San Geronimo poster, the Native American woman has dark stylized tears - rendered fashionably scary, like motorcycle chic - streaming down her face. This image invokes another archetype from Women Who Run with the Wolves - the female "Scar Clan":
“For women, tears are the beginning of initiation into the Scar Clan, that timeless tribe of women of all colors… who through the ages have lived through a great something, and yet who stood proud...”
So, the central figure in Darren’s poster could be a symbol for acknowledging loss and grief, as women have been doing forever. (Ohh weepy women...) Yet as it turns out, recognizing loss and respecting the grieving process is necessary for healing, as Alan D. Wolfelt writes in Transcending Divorce and The Journey Through Grief. (Maybe not a shocker. It's like AA.)
Indeed, healing experts such as Wolfelt and Pinkola Estes recommend sharing the grief with others; because healing comes through sharing, telling, listening and grieving together.
To that, I would add: grooving together. And in Northern California, we have the music and the community to do that.
Copyright 2022-2025 Amber Ortiz